Reimbursable travel expenses for work?

-My company does not offer corporate credit cards when we need to travel for business. While we can direct bill our airline flights through our company travel agency, we cannot do the same with hotels. (I assume this is because there are only about 4-6 airlines we could use, and thousands of hotels we could possibly stay at all over the country, and to set up some sort of 'direct billing' between the company and any hotel we could possibly stay at throughout the country- would be a huge undertaking).



My company does offer what they call a 'travel advance' that is only for food, taxi, bus, and other incidental expenses, you cannot use it for hotels or rental cars. (They say the reason is because our accounting department won't issue a check without a receipt - which makes NO sense as they will give us money for food/taxi service that we won't have any receipts for until we actually eat/use it)



Note that our company WILL reimburse us for any expenses we incur while traveling.



I'm not sure the company understands that not all employees make enough money or have enough 'in savings' for this type of trip. Note: it's very rare that I travel for work, and there is no mention of 'travel' in my job description, but we are installing a new computer system, and I need to go to this training for my job.



I don't like to play the "it's not fair card", but again, I'm a lower level employee and don't have a couple of thousand dollars laying around and it's a bit embarrassing to have to admit that.



Any thoughts on what I should do ?